Though all of Paul Thomas Anderson's four features (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia and now Punch-Drunk Love) are commendable for their audacious visuals and unexpected sincerity, what really bowls me over is the distinctly youthful vitality that his movies convey. With the notable exception of Richard Linklater, I can think of no other U.S. studio director who so consistently and eagerly expresses his love of life, love of cinema, and love of love—and, in the tradition of the passionate cinephilic directors whom Anderson cites as influences, his films often present these qualities as one in the same.

Here is a filmmaker who imparts not only his heart but his brains and guts on to every frame he shoots, seeming to exhaust himself in the process. With this in mind, Punch-Drunk Love is the most fitting title he's come up with to date: Its combination of visceral effect and shot of emotion has the same endearing quality as his direction.

Almost as exhilarating as watching one of Anderson's films is sorting through the stir that they create. I don't remember anybody speaking ambivalently about Magnolia when it came out three years ago, yet its detractors' brutal cynicism (which somehow turned ambition and honesty into negative attributes) seemed to confirm its significance as much as the loving raves. More proof of Anderson's current relevance: older audiences don't seem to get him. Read any critic over 50 writing about his work and you'll see what I mean; even when the writers seem to appreciate him, the prose is still too cool, too controlled to properly convey the excitement and immediacy of his art (Roger Ebert's reviews probably define this pat Baby Boomer approval better than I can). But as good as it feels to claim a Hollywood director as belonging to my generation, P.T. Anderson is ultimately, unapologetically no one's man but his own.

To say that his work is a rush of new blood isn't to imply that Anderson doesn't carry a rich understanding of film history. Punch-Drunk, in fact, overflows with references to other movies, yet like the work of the French New Wave, these references reveal the director's love of his predecessors instead of a desire to mimic them. The first half-hour contains meticulously framed widescreen images that toy with the relationship between isolated objects and their monumental surroundings which resemble the formal comedy of Jacques Tati; Adam Sandler's protagonist wears a bright blue sport coat throughout the movie that critics have compared to those worn by Jerry Lewis; and a romantic interlude is scored to a sweetly awful song from Robert Altman's Popeye.

These references are fun to spot, although, like Joyce's literary and historical allusions in Ulysses, one need not understand them all in order to appreciate the narrative (even if they add to is overall density). Besides, Anderson's main focal point seems to be something much broader than any individual film: To put it simply, Punch-Drunk Love desires nothing less than a re-evaluation of the Hollywood musical and pre-1960 dramatic spectacle, with particular reverence for the joy they exude. In this regard, Punch-Drunk bears similarities to three other big-budgeted Hollywood movies of the past year, The Royal Tenenbaums, Moulin Rouge, and Amelie (a Hollywood production in all but the subtitles).

While I'm a big fan of the genres that these four films pay tribute to, I think that Anderson's is the only one that doesn't misinterpret the older films' legacy. Granted, the genres in question often sported lavish production design, optimistic characters, and reaffirmed the merits of escapism, but their would-be successors carry the assumption that escapist entertainment bears no responsibility to real life. Nonetheless, a film like Meet Me in St. Louis (while obviously shot on a set and filtered through Vincente Minnelli's humanism and impressionist color palette) truly respects the memories of a previous generation and the tensions of an ordinary middle-class family. These recent films (while, in the case of Tenenbaums and Amelie, partially shot on location) go to such length to detach their stories from actual human experiences that they end up doing the same thing for their characters' arrested emotional development and broken family lives. For me, these films lack a lasting emotional relevance and take confrontation out of art.

Punch-Drunk, like the great films of Minnelli, uses ambitious camera work and an unbelievable narrative to elevate the joys of real life to those that can only be fully realized by cinema. However––and this is key––the film establishes a connection to the world we live in before taking its leap into reverie (much like The Wizard of Oz). Like Anderson's last two films, the story is geographically autobiographical, and the director's understanding of the San Fernando Valley's streets, warehouses and restaurants gives the film the feeling of a confessional work. Further, the scenes depicting the despair of the lonely and the mentally ill (the prior being a career-long obsession for Anderson, and he continues to depict it with the fragile poetry it deserves) are unsettling and even a little scary, creating a jagged, yet tangible framework for the stylized romanticism.

It's when Anderson lets his romantic impulses run wild that the movie soars. Unexpected bursts of dada-like color take the place of traditional musical numbers, a clever re-imagining of a genre staple within our contemporary world of cell phone conversation, giant supermarkets, and anonymous airports (three of the film's major set pieces). Anderson's graceful dolly shots—where the camera is put on a track and physically moved beside or through the action—are some of the most beautiful in contemporary movies. Also inspired are the out-of-focus shots and intentionally-amateurish uses of natural light which occur most often during the film's nervous opening passages.

These techniques open the audience up to the filmmaking process itself, an attempt to make the audience love directing movies as much as Anderson does. It's for this reason that I consider Anderson to be falsely labeled as a pretentious director; his style is to call attention to the potential of the medium, not himself.

I realize that I've barely mentioned Punch-Drunk's plot or characters in this review. I've done this for a few reasons: One, the characters are, in the tradition of great Hollywood musicals, fairly simple, really; Sandler's Barry seems to embody pure fragility and unchecked passive-aggression and Emily Watson's Lena (who falls in love with Barry as improbably as any of the beautiful heroines of Jerry Lewis comedies) represents, alternately, quiet desperation and great optimism. Their iconic presences—aided by Sandler and Watson's now-familiar screen personae—are the emotional equivalent of Minnelli's bold primary colors.

Two, the film's narrative is so consistently surprising that I wouldn't want to deprive any readers of the thrill of being surprised. Anderson's screenwriting may be his least recognized talent, and the playful manipulations of conventional story structure (which can be hilarious or terrifying, or both, as evident in an extended scene depicting phone sex gone wrong) are a perfect compliment to his visual daring.

Third, I'd like to emphasize that the film's idiosyncratic technique is more likely to inform your opinion of it than its story (though if you don't like how Anderson has to tell it, you're more likely to find fault in his leaps of common sense). Since I happen to connect with Anderson's particular love of movies and naïve view of love, I suppose that makes me more willing than most to accept whatever he wants to say.

If Punch-Drunk Love ultimately amounts to an acquired taste, then I accept that, too, and realize that this article is little more than cheerleading for a team I like. To close, then, let me cite the simplest reason I know to justify my cheerleading: When I came out of the Grandview after watching the film, I was literally shaking from the purity of its emotion and faith in the unexplored potential of the cinema. I wish every movie I went to did that to me.